Shopify Pricing and Shopify Plus Pricing: An In-Depth Guide for Choosing the Best Plan (October 2018)

Shopify is know as one of the best ways to create and manage your own ecommerce store without putting much into the site in terms of custom coding and development. In fact, over 100,000 stores use Shopify to manage and sell products online. The online store platform is the full package, with a store management dashboard, highly customizable product pages, coupon codes, domains and hosting, and direct shopping cart and payment processing support. Read on to get into Shopify pricing.

That’s all fine, and it’s clear that Shopify is a wonderful option for just about any store type and size, but what happens when you finally decide to opt for the Shopify platform? The company offers five different pricing plans, it sells domains and you can even choose to pay for additional apps to improve your store.

With all of these options, where do you start? Is the starter plan too basic or are you just getting started with a few products? This is your guide for everything you need to know about choosing a pricing plan through Shopify, so let’s have a close look.

Just before you start though, you might want to take a look at our Shopify reviews.

Comparing Shopify Pricing Plans

You can opt for one of five Shopify plans: Shopify Lite, Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify and Shopify Plus. Each of them has varying features, and naturally, as you upgrade to the higher priced options, you receive more powerful tools. Keep reading to figure out which one is right for you.

What is your monthly revenue (USD)?
$:
Are you using Shopify Payments?
What are your external payment gateway fees?
% +
¢
How often do you want to pay?

Fraud analysis iIf you use Shopify Payments the fraud analysis tools are included. If you choose an external payment gateway, you need to upgrade to Shopify or Advanced Shopify for fraud analysis tools.

The first plan is not recommended for everyone, but it offers options for selling on Facebook, accepting credit card payments and using Buy buttons. You don't get your own shopping cart, but you can copy and paste the Buy buttons anywhere on your website. Invoicing is provided as well, so it's not a bad deal for those just getting started out.

Running a full ecommerce site is not really possible with this plan. It's nice for young entrepreneurs and small businesses just trying to test the water. It's also not a bad plan for those with just a handful of products to sell. Keep in mind that you can only have one staff account for this plan.

With the Basic Shopify Plan you can upload unlimited products and unlimited file storage, but you get hit with the 2.9% + 30¢ credit cards fees. You also have the opportunity to use the Shopify POS if you run a physical store as well.

The discount engine and fraud analysis tools are the primary features that aren’t offered in the Starter package, but you’re still missing some other components like professional reports, gift cards and abandoned cart recovery. Two staff accounts are given with this plan.

The Basic Shopify Plan is for the company that may not have two or three original products to sell, but they want to post and sell hundreds of items without any limitations. Once again, this is still a starter pack, so you miss out on gift cards and reports (tools that top ecommerce stores must have,) but the discount engine is a nice way to keep people coming back for more.

In my opinion, this is for the company that plans on drop shipping hundreds of items and they don’t quite want to make the jump to the Professional plan.

The Shopify Plan is for the company that has hundreds of products to sell, and they plan on scaling fast. It provides all the tools you need to understand how customers interact, and you can always upgrade if you feel your company outgrows the plan. If you expect large sales numbers, it’s worth the smaller credit card fee.

The description is all in the name of this plan, since you get advanced storage and product uploads, along with the additions of the advanced report builder and real-time carrier shipping. Not only that, but your credit card fees decrease even more, at 2.4% + 30¢.

The Advanced Shopify plan works well for the company that plans on rolling out new product lines and ideas on a regular basis. The unlimited storage is nice for uploading numerous videos and photos, so I figure a large clothing or even consumer technology store would find this useful.

The plan has a limit of 15 staff accounts, but this is pretty solid for most larger businesses. If you need more, jump to the Shopify Plus plan.

The advanced report builder is an interesting component because this tells me that the companies who use this plan have an analytics wiz on the team, constantly figuring out new ways to test and move customers through the store.

Shopify Plus is the enterprise level system when you need resources to focus on things like marketing and design, as opposed to order management. Your site is fully hosted, and you don’t incur any transaction fees. The 200 TB of storage is more than enough to handle the most robust stores.

Price: You must contact Shopify to receive a quote, but it’s going to be higher than $179 per month.

Who is This Plan Best For?

Huge companies like DodoCase or the Los Angeles Lakers. This doesn’t negate smaller companies, but if you have a large team, and you don’t want to spend too much time on managing your orders, this is the way to automate that.

How Much You’re Going to Spend on Domains and Hosting with Shopify

None of the Shopify plans outlined above include domains. That said, you have a chance to buy a domain for $9 per year through Shopify. This is fairly reasonable, considering I just paid around $14 through Bluehost for a yearly domain renewal, but other domain providers like GoDaddy and NameCheap might give you some better rates.

When you pay for a plan you also receive reliable and unlimited web hosting. This is a huge plus since it can save you over $100 per year. The fast servers have around a 99.94% uptime, and the unlimited email forwarding gives every person in your organization an email address with your domain name in it.

When you start building your Shopify store you may notice that it’s missing some tools or functionality that you think would help your company. Maybe you need a better email newsletter system or an out of stock preorder tool. You also have the option to design the site frontend with a pre-built theme.

Go to the App Store or Theme Store to browse through your options. In short, the more powerful themes and apps cost money, and the basic ones are free. The highest priced theme is $180, but keep in mind that this is a one-time fee.

The apps are a little tough to hammer down a price for, but many of them are free, some have small one-time fees, and I even noticed one (an affiliate tracking platform) that was $179 per month.

That’s it! Do you know what plan to choose with Shopify? If not, shoot me an email on czorzini@gmail.com and I’ll do my best to help you out. In case you want to learn more about Shopify, here's my full Shopify review.

Btw, I've done a video version of the guide for you in case you want to hear my voice 🙂

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